The Velvet Swing

Little Shoes

Love and Death in the Sunshine State

The Trauma Cleaner

Notorious Killers and the Woman Who Mops Up the Gore

Marilyn Stasio considers six new true-crime books, including one about the Golden State Killer and one about a woman whose company cleans up “homicide, suicide and death scenes.”

By MARILYN STASIOJUNE 1, 2018

Have you heard? They may finally have caught the Golden State Killer, who managed to commit more than 50 rapes and 12 murders between 1976 and 1986, until he just … stopped. (An ingenious application of forensic science brought him down, but that’s another story.) If there’s any justice left in the world, that law-enforcement coup should fire up interest in I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99), the definitive crime study of one of the most elusive offenders to come out of California — or anywhere, really. Sadly, the good news can’t reach the author, Michelle McNamara, who died in 2016, leaving an investigative journalist and a researcher to finish this comprehensive and important study of how a killer can elude detection for almost 40 years.

The killing didn’t start right away. In the beginning, this night stalker restricted himself to raping single women in their bedrooms and limited his activities to the Sacramento area of Northern California. Back then, he wore a homemade mask and was known as the East Area Rapist. After committing as many as 50 sexual assaults, he worked his way down to Santa Barbara and attacked couples. That’s when he escalated to murder.

Thrillers

The Captives

Social Creature

The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Our Kind of Cruelty

Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

Providence

by Caroline Kepnes

6 Pulse-Pounding Summer Thrillers

If you like your vacation reading to deliver excitement, we’ve got books for you.

By CHARLES FINCHJUNE 1, 2018

Even the most modest mystery novel has the dignity of its lineage. It runs from an echt genius, Edgar Allan Poe, through Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, downriver in time to Kate Atkinson and Tana French. In the permanent war that all genre fiction wages for respect, it can claim partial but persuasive ownership even of Dickens, of Voltaire.

But the thriller is new money. Where did it come from? It has indistinct antecedents in the adventure novel, the spy novel and the hybrid midcentury experimentations of Elmore Leonard, but realistically, the answer isn’t pretty: Its pure form was the invention of Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth, who set their lone heroes loose against immense forces in the 1970s and haven’t come back for them yet. The genre spread fast and hard — America had all that unmelting, isolate, stoic toughness, and, with the west at last wholly settled, nowhere to put it, fictionally. Eventually an Englishman came up with Jack Reacher. Now a non-trivial percentage of us is convinced that biology teachers should carry guns.

Something Old, Something New

Saladish

How to Eat a Peach

Feast

Cake

The Taartwork Pies Cookbook

From Vegan Barbecue to Apple Pie: New Cookbooks for Everyone

This season’s food writers serve up both recipes and stories, from Sam Kass’s tales of cooking at the White House to Maira Kalman’s memories of cakes.

By JENNY ROSENSTRACHJUNE 1, 2018

If you’re a certain kind of cook, the ecstasy of a spring farmer’s market, with its sweet sugar snap peas, bright peppery lettuces and juicy strawberries that are red all the way through, can easily give way to a sense of unease: the fear that you’re not making the most of all that’s on offer. (Perhaps you’re still agonizing over missing those three minutes when ramps were available?) One way to fend off this very fortunate brand of anxiety is to check out some new cookbooks. Thankfully, just in time, there’s the expected flood of vegetable-reverent titles, as well as books that will take you to all corners of the world and personal, nostalgic journeys inspiring the rediscovery of classics that feel just right for the season of rebirth.

EAT A LITTLE BETTER: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World (Clarkson Potter, $32.50), by Sam Kass, is about cooking for the Obamas when they were in the White House. Not designing menus for state dinners or assembling cookie platters for holiday parties but devising flavorful, nutritious everyday meals for Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha in their private residence, where 6:30 dinner was a command performance for every member of the family, including the president. “It was an inspiring sight,” Kass writes, “the busiest man in the world carving out time for this daily ritual.” Of course, the insider stories are irresistible — there’s “POTUS’s lucky pasta,” which Obama credited with a triumphant presidential debate against Mitt Romney, and there’s the barbecued roast chicken that was the first family’s first dinner in the White House (it “had to serve as a comfort to four people whose lives were changing forever”).

Room to Dream

Homey Don't Play That!

Bruce Lee: A Life

All the Pieces Matter

How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Space Odyssey

From ‘The Wire’ to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ New Books Cover Screens Big and Small

A new batch of summer reading tells the back story of some of the greatest movies and television.

By BEN DICKINSONJUNE 1, 2018

The director David Lynch, of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” fame, is mournful over the probable demise of theatrical cinema. “Home systems could get really good,” he suggests wistfully in his new book, ROOM TO DREAM (Random House, $32). “The other thing that could happen is, movies will be streamed directly to your phone, and that wouldn’t be so good.” Well, I’m here to tell Lynch that my children are already there; as they peer down into their luminous rectangles like Narcissus hovering over his reflecting pool, the tiny screen is eclipsing the big and small screens alike — the world revealed on a surface resembling a 3-by-5 index card.

Not that Lynch need unduly worry about his talents becoming obsolete. As “Room to Dream,” written with the Los Angeles–based critic and journalist Kristine McKenna, makes clear, his artistic Midas touch lately extends from film and television to painting and music; like Patti Smith (and possibly nobody else), Lynch apparently gets up in the morning and makes art in one medium and another right up until bedtime. “Room to Dream” is, as the introduction observes, “basically a person having a conversation with his own biography.” McKenna turns in an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch’s career, larded with insightful quotes from dozens of people whose lives have intersected with his — after each chapter of which Lynch offers, at similar length, his own impressionistic and free-associative commentary.

Romance

The Chateau

Wicked and the Wallflower

Too Wilde to Wed

Pas de Deux

The Kiss Quotient

Luck of the Draw

A Scandalous Deal

by Joanna Shupe

Unmasked by the Marquess

by Cat Sebastian

8 Summer Romance Novels

Escape to Regency England, Gilded Age New York or a French sex-commune chateau.

By JAIME GREENJUNE 1, 2018

Some people say that summer reading — whether poolside or briskly air-conditioned — means big, unwieldy books, too heavy to lug farther than from the shelf to the lounge chair, a single volume to last the season. These people baffle me. The best summer reading is absorbing, delightful and, in the sun or shade, will make you break a sweat. That’s romance, and here are eight new releases for the summer. They’ll take you from Regency England to Gilded Age New York to present day, from summer camp to a Broadway stage to, yes, a sex-commune chateau in rural France.

Let’s start with that sex-commune chateau. Tiffany Reisz’s THE CHATEAU(8th Circle Press; paper, $14.95; ebook, $5.99) is both a spiritual sequel to the midcentury erotic novel “Story of O” and a prequel to Reisz’s erotic thriller series, Original Sinners, but it works beautifully as a stand-alone story. There are a few hints at its prequel nature, but let those flow by and there’s a surprisingly engrossing erotic thriller here all on its own. I say “surprisingly” because the plot, on paper, is thin. Kingsley Boissonneault, a lieutenant in a secret French military intelligence agency, is tasked with rescuing a supervisor’s nephew from a suspected cult. What Kingsley finds is a fully consensual commune where men serve the women and everyone is very happy with the situation. Kingsley is a secret masochist, which gives him an edge in gaining entry to the chateau as well as a thorny past to work through in his time there — he’s haunted by dreams of his high school lover, a beautiful and sadistic boy who abandoned him. By the strictest rules of romance, “The Chateau” isn’t one — the core of the book isn’t a romantic relationship, but Kingsley’s coming to peace with his past. But it’s surely a romantic thriller, and a very erotic one at that. Reisz writes sadomasochistic scenes that are charged with love and care alongside the sex and suffering, and Kingsley is an engaging hero to follow on this strange fantasy of a mission.

Couchsurfing in Iran

A Line in the River

The Epic City

The Milk Lady of Bangalore

The Traveling Feast

The Road Trip Book

We’ll Always Have Paris: Also Isfahan, Khartoum and Calcutta

Why do we travel? New books consider that question, in venues as varied as a Central American jungle, a glacier in Alaska and a Midwestern parlor.

By LIESL SCHILLINGERJUNE 1, 2018

Like a literary companion to Google Earth, a host of new books zero in on points across the globe from Alaska to Iran, the Middle East to Mesoamerica, Khartoum to Calcutta and, of course, Paris (we’ll always have Paris), providing highly individual answers to the question: Why do we travel?

Patricia Hampl isn’t sure we should. Raised in Minnesota, educated by nuns, she long sought to reconcile her Roman Catholic school appreciation of the “inner voice” with her “native” Midwestern trait: “the desire to be elsewhere.” Early in THE ART OF THE WASTED DAY(Viking, $26), she reaches back to Chaucer to grasp the roots of wanderlust. “Springtime, after a winter cooped up, and everyone wants to hit the road,” she writes, paraphrasing his zestful Canterbury pilgrims. Hampl suspects that a less cheery impulse motivates contemporary American wanderers, a national mania — encoded in the Declaration of Independence — to pursue happiness, rather than “stay put” and simply be happy. But after the death of her husband, she found that her enjoyment of her quiet hours had palled. To rekindle her pleasure in her own company, she embarked on “a tour of the heroes of leisure,” men and women like the “sluggish, lax and drowsy” French philosopher Montaigne, who holed up in a drafty tower to write his “Essais”; the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel, who founded the science of genetics as he cultivated his abbey’s garden; and the reclusive 18th-century Welsh BFFs known as the Ladies of Llangollen. Here Hampl finds proof of the endurance of “the sane singular voice, alone with its thoughts,” which doesn’t need to cross mountains to express itself.

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

From Hip-Hop to Christian Rock

Some readers sniff that only those with especially eventful lives should have the temerity to publish memoirs. Even such readers will be fine with the record executive Seymour Stein having written SIREN SONG: My Life in Music (St. Martin’s, $28.99). After all, Stein was in the hospital awaiting possible heart surgery when a then-unknown Madonna visited his bedside seeking a record deal and playfully said, “Take me, I’m yours!” That event and its aftermath, which might warrant a full memoir from someone else, is but a passing episode for the ever-hustling Stein, who has to leave space for his time working with the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders, the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T and many others.

Stein has led the kind of life that makes this sentence sound utterly routine: “On Thanksgiving 1974, we had Elton John and his band over for turkey and pumpkin pie.” (John Lennon showed up for dessert.)

Designing With Palms

Desert Gardens of Steve Martino

The Book of Seeds

Peony

Martha's Flowers

Moths Aren’t All Bad and Nightingales Love Pasta

A roundup of outdoor books takes you from Central Park to the desert gardens of the Southwest, with time out for insect, botanical and avian lore.

By DOMINIQUE BROWNINGJUNE 1, 2018

Soon after I moved to Manhattan in the late 1970s, an old friend taught me to roller-skate. It feels like a lifetime ago now. We would go dancing at clubs — those disco nights — and then, as a new day dawned, lace up our boots and roll into Central Park. We had the place to ourselves, though getting any speed was tricky since the roads were pocked and potted. On all sides, the lawns were filthy and tattered. But as I looped through it, I fell in love with Central Park.

Luckily, at about the same time another woman felt the same way. SAVING CENTRAL PARK: A History and a Memoir (Knopf, $30) is Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’s inspiring story of how, in the face of considerable resistance, she created a partnership to privately augment the funding and management of the park. Rogers attended the Yale School of Architecture’s city planning program while her husband was at law school. By the time they moved to New York, she had a daughter. But Rogers remembers how deeply resonant were the words she read in Betty Friedan’s 1963 volume, “The Feminine Mystique”: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

Why Baseball Matters

The Last Cowboys

The Heritage

The Integration of the Pacific Coast League

The Language of the Game

Summertime Sports Books: From Keith Hernandez to Vladimir Nabokov

This season’s batch features a rakish first baseman, Albert Camus the brooding goalkeeper and a bucking bronc named Lunatic From Hell.

By JOHN SWANSBURGJUNE 1, 2018

Keith Hernandez doesn’t like baseball memoirs. “It feels like they’ve become a paint-by-numbers exercise,” the former first baseman laments at the outset of his own entry in the genre. He’s confident you know about the time the 1986 Mets won the World Series. He doesn’t want to trot out the old war stories.

What he offers instead is an impressionistic account of his baseball boyhood, a kind of “Remembrance of At-Bats Past,” complete with a baked good to set the memories in motion. When Hernandez was growing up in Pacifica, Calif., his father worked as a fireman. After an overnight shift, he would bring home fresh sourdough bread from a bakery in San Francisco. It was “soft on the inside with a crust that made your teeth work just the right amount.” Hernandez aspires for his book to be like that bread: “Something that you set your teeth into and say, ‘Keith, that’s pretty good. More, please.’”